1. Technical Field
The present disclosure generally relates to selecting among service providing machines and, more specifically, to selecting using information regarding time that the machines use to perform individual actions of a requested service.
2. Related Art
Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is a concept that includes developing software to be provided as one or more interoperable services. Each of the services has an interface that is defined in terms of protocols and functionality, which allows an SOA system to integrate many different services. In a typical scenario, a consumer of the services (sometimes referred to as a client) accesses the services over a network. SOA can be used, for instance, in an enterprise to provide a wide variety of business logic functions to consumers in a manner that is convenient and easy to access. An example of a form that some SOA services take is Web Services, which includes the provision of functionalities over the World Wide Web (the web), although SOA is not necessarily limited to Web Services. SOA services may be implemented in some enterprises as middleware and may be customized by the enterprise's Information Technology (IT) staff to be adapted for specific business needs of the enterprise.
Some enterprises have access to very large computer systems, where multiple machines within the computer system may provide the same or similar services. For instance, a payroll calculator service may be implemented on multiple machines in order to provide access to the service to multiple consumers at the same time while minimizing delay in access thereto.